Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6568759" data-attributes="member: 82106">I have been a DM of D&D games starting with OD&D and Holme's Basic back in 1976, built several settings, and run 1000's upon 1000's of games across probably 50 campaigns. I have no idea how magic works in any sort of conceptual sense. I can see that at various points the designers of different elements of D&D spells, lore, cosmology, monsters, items, etc have employed various concepts of 'classic' magic, such as similarity, contagion, the rule of threes, as well as various other theories and ad-hoc informal or simply entirely made-up concepts and principles. The game clearly posits that some forms of magic require study and mastery and involve mental 'energy' which is expended when certain formulaic spells are cast. Other magic lacks this restriction and is granted by divine beings (the nature and capabilities of which are pretty much open, though some books stated various mechanical details that evolved over time and often conflicted). So, no, I, and every other of the 100's of DMs I've associated with over that neigh onto 40 year span, has ever come up with a coherent theory of magic of any sort. At best we could pull something out of our ears like "yeah, the blood of a strong dragon should make you strong!" or something equally nebulous and which could be or not be true at the DM's whim pretty much.Yeah, I don't think that really happens. I think DMs learn to use the chances that players give them to make the game turn out in a cool and interesting way. An inexperienced DM might say "No, you cannot use the dragon blood to make a potion of fire breathing!" because he reasons PCs should have to work for their treasure. Later on said DM will probably realize that it would be perfectly cool to let the PCs make the potion, but he can now send them on another quest to find the other ingredients, which he will make up on the spot and are guaranteed to be hard enough to find that it will be interesting. A really advanced DM might even consider something like telling the wizard that he has to make a pact with a salamander to learn the secret of fire breath potion making, which he knows will lead to a moral dilemma when said salamander demands that he in turn give up the location of an item that it will probably use for evil purposes. Such, IME is the trajectory of evolution in DMing. In no case have I seen it involve the elaboration and invention of detailed theories of magic as a requisite of DMing expertise. Now, there are undoubtedly settings in which something of that sort has been done. Dark Sun of course famously introduced some elements to magic in Athas, but they never really explained defiling or how it exactly worked outside of the bare mechanical/narrative fact of it. I don't even recall that there really were precise mechanics for it. Magic was just 'icky' and you didn't want to use it too much unless you were a bad guy. Its not as if there was a detailed treatise on it that some DM could use to guide a PC wizard who was trying to invent a way around it for instance.</blockquote>

Verification